Words we should all live by…
:D:D:D:D:D
The “endowing rocks with personality” thing seems to make a kind of sense. After all, kids have lots of imagination and rocks are plentiful and handy by. What I don’t understand is why the Hawklette insisted, at the age of two or so, on carrying a pebble around in her hand all day that wasn’t endowed (so far as we could tell) with a personality. It was just a pebble and had to be clung to for dear life, no matter what else she was doing or how it impeded her. She used to climb monkey bars with a thumb and forefinger, the other three clutching her “petit caillou” for all they were worth.
Personality was reserved for “Camellia,” a person of dubious moral character who hung around and committed unspeakable acts but was never to be seen when the results were revealed and the consequences doled out.
Dave, why should we be surprised if our kids turned out weird, when we had a father who, for our whines of boredom, would offer relief by suggesting we “choose up sides and smell armpits.”?
My children are beyond the weird stage, (13 and 10) but my SIL stopped by for a visit with “The Babies,” her two sons, and the other SIL’s two daughters, all five or younger.
In the course of the visit, I asked the children what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Older nephew: An engineer. He wants to build trains.
Younger nephew: A paleontologist. He wants to find dinosaur bones. (He couldn’t quite pronouce paleontologist, but I got the idea.)
Older niece: Everything. Arms thrown wide.
Younger niece: A rainbow unicorn pegasus horse. Because she likes them.
As for my children, when my daughter was younger, she came in from outside with muddy feet. I told her to go to the bathroom to wash up. She dutifully toddles off.
Silence ensues. As all parents know, that is akin to sirens on a submarine signally general quarters.
I crack open the bathroom door to find her sitting on the counter, feet in a sink full of suds, happily scrubbing between her toes with her brother’s toothbrush.
I did it constantly until I was 11 or 12. I can still recall some of the storylines…
She’s off to a good start.
This thread has me cracking up.
Ok, to add a one of my own:
My 4 year old daughter wakes up really early. Before anyone else. Before we rearranged the kids room, she’d wake up her 2 year old brother, tip over his playpen/crib and he’d scramble out and they’d play for a bit until we woke up. Which was cute, until one morning, we get up to silence, head out to the kitchen, and see the two of them eating ice cream with chop sticks!! They’d stick the stick in, then lick off whatever they got. Myself and my SO were laughing so hard, it took a few minutes to calm down enough to take the ice cream away. Cause, you know, ice cream for breakfast?
GOOD stories here, my friends. Thank you!
**Shirley, ** I remember the matchbox car incident you referenced. IIRC, it was in another kid thread I’d started…a “brag on your kid” thread, because on that day, my daughter had done something wonderful instead of something weird. Can’t remember what, though. 
**CanvasShoes, ** that’s one of my biggest problems. Sometimes it’s just reeeeeeeeally difficult to say “no, stop doing that,” when you’re laughing so hard you can’t breathe. No way the kids will buy it.
Tonight, my daughter got her first pair of roller skates. She tried them out for a bit outside (since the snow is melting and it was rather spring-like outside today), but she fell and scraped her hand a little. No problem. Later tonight, though, she put them back on, and was having a little fun with them in her (hardwood floored) bedroom. Naked, again, except for the skates.
Dear Goddess. I’m just going to have to institute a Dana Carvey-style “naked time,” aren’t I?
For reasons I cannot imagine, when the Man-Cub and Fem-Bot were toddlers, I used to let them sit in the room and watch Rescue: 9-11 with us. There’s the backstory.
I’m stuck in NY, working. The Wifestrocity takes the kids to Pittsburgh to see her parents during August. During the ENTIRE trip, the Man-Cub amused himself and his sister by picking up their toy phone, and saying,
. ( Apparently, he always said please. To me, this is priceless).
They arrive, the adults are downstairs. The kids are upstairs. They’re about 3 1/2, and 2. Things are fairly quiet, and they’re playing and gazing vaplidly at the t.v. After about a half hour, the phone rings.
9-11 Operator: Yes, this is the 9-11 Operator. Is everything all right there?
Wifestrocity: Yes, why?
9-11 Operator: Well, for the last 20 minutes or so, someone at this number has been calling up, saying " Hello, 9-11? Can you come arrest Fem-Bot, please? " and hanging up before I can say anything. This is a very serious issue, you know…
Wife is in hysterics, she shares with her parents, who are also highly amused. She then gathers herself up, goes upstairs and gives the Man-Cub what-for.
I call that evening.
Toons: How was the drive?
Wifestrocity: Here, scream at your son for what he did.
Toons: What did he do?
Man-Cub ( handed phone ) Awawhfhhhhhhhh I didn’t blahwah wahhhhhhhhhhh sniffle sob waaaaaaaaaaah.
Toons: I love you honey. Give mommy the phone, okay?
Wifestrocity: Can you BELIEVE THAT???
Now, at the ages of almost-13, and 11 the kids LOVE that story.
Speaking of what kids announce as their future careers, the Man-Cub has ALWAYS wanted to be a weatherperson. He knew the words, ’ Meteorologist, Tornado, Hurricane, Cold Front, Humidity’ long before other words.
Despite this, he was incapable of identifying clouds as anything other than, " cummumo-mimmbus ".
Cartooniverse
Man I could write a book! behold the power of a 2 year old girl and a 3 year old boy:
-They destroy everything in their room on a daily basis, thus they can have no toys in their room. Toys go out the window, as do their clothes. Since we live on the 9th floor, toys flying out the window isnt too cool for people below.
-They take their beds apart every day. This means lifting up the (twin size, not toddler size) mattresses and throwing them around the room.
-They both resist potty training. rather than saying they dirtied their diapers, they remove them and smear them on the walls.
-They have wild mood swings: one minute 'i want to watch bambi! please let me watch bambi" and the next, a hysterrically shrieked “I NOT WANNA watch bambi anymore! Ever again!” they do this with toys and foods too, not just movies.
-They fight viciously, and after “nap time” emerge from their room bruised up.
-Most of their insanity is while they’re supposed to be sleeping. They refuse to sleep. If me or my husband sits in their room till they fall asleep, they don’t go to sleep. If we leave them alone, they take apart their beds and heater and throw their stuff out the window.
-When the boy was 2, he enjoyed wearing his sister’s pink flowered pants and insisted they were his. She on the other hand, at one, would rub her genitals every time her diaper was off. She grew out of that but now is facinated with being naked and peeing on the floor whenever she can.
My 3 year old boy is still in the process of getting potty trained, most of the time he refuses to go or doesnt ask when he has to. but whe he actually is in the bathroom, he likes to sit on the toilet and flush multiple times, whether he peed or not. We don’t keep toilet paper around cause he and his ssiter are little monkeys and I can only imagine what they’d do with it…but I think the flushing of a toilet is fascinating to most little kids.
I have a girl around the same age who’s a bit similar…she’s very bossy too and hits me and her dad. But when she’s being cuddly she’s actually worse because she’s not very coordinated. She’ll jump all over her dad like he’s a plaything and poke him in the eyes, smack him, step on his crotch (very hard, I might add), etc. She’ll beat me in the head repeatedly with mega blocks and force her fingers into my mouth. This is all her way of showing love and affection. If you stop her, she cries and then hits with anger. She and her brother drive me crazy.
I wish mine would do that sort of thing, it shows imagination. Mine don’t play pretend much of anything, I tried to tell my boy that his blocks were cars and he got mad and yelled “stop it they’re blocks, ok?” At christmas I told him santa was bringing his toys and he rolled his eyes and said “no, DADDY is getting them at the store.”
I used to play really imaginatively when I was a kid, I guess it fed into my adult pursuits as writer/actress person. I had a thing of tinker toys (remember those?) and made a “tv show” out of them called Robotical Space, when I was about 4. One of those things of rocks you put in water and they grow? things was my own planet. When I was like 8 or 9, my barbie dolls would play in original stories I made up that sometimes involved fires, body switching, or american history.
I’d also say really cryptic things to my parents as a toddler, like “uh oh spaghettios” (may have been from a commercial?) and honeydew-dew-dews I just love them!" while sniffing my mother’s arm.
When my daughter was being potty trained (she must have been about 2), she was at grandma’s house. Grandma told her to sit on the potty and try to go. Well, my daughter found a bottle of Pine-Sol, and poured a little of it into her potty chair. She opened the bathroom door and told grandma that she’d used the potty. Grandma was really proud until she smelled the overwhelming scent of pine when she emptied the pot into the toilet.
My sister takes my daughter to Utah to see our brother afew weeks ago. They see some snow, (since we live in the southwest, it’s a pretty neato thing). So, my sis stops the car and they make a snowman. This all goes well, until they finish and my 4 year old turns to her auntie and says, “Now it’s time to kill him” and runs and jumps on the snowman and wrestles it into smoosh before my sis can react. This happens in front of several other motorists.
My 2 yo thinks it’s high hilarity to make like he’s going to kiss me and then “MOO” at the top of his lungs about an inch from my cheek.
Only being 16, I have no children of my own. (unlike some of my contemporaries.) So I must tell a tale of myself.
Story time!
When I was about 5-6-7-ish, my parents and I took a long trip all up and down the East Coast. We must have gone to every single aquarium, and one day we were in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusettes. For some reason, there were a lot of men wearing skirts walking around. (Later, we found out that it was just “Men in Skirts Day.”) I was astounded, “whoa, they’re wearing girl clothes!” So I asked my mom why they were wearing skirts, and she said that they were transvestites, people who liked dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex. It made sense to me, so I didn’t ask anymore.
So a couple of days later, we were somewhere else (I don’t remember where) and it had similar architecture to P-town, so I though we we’d returned. There was just one thing missing, though…
"Mommy, where are all the transvestites?"
Loud. In front of a whole bunch of people.
I also insisted on wearing my bathing suit to school as a shirt, told people I was a stegosaurus named “Steggy Swim,” had three imaginary horses named Sticks, Buzzer, and Squash, refused to wear sneakers, and had a backpack with trout on it.
I forgot to add that my kids like to send small toys out the window during summer as well. I’d come home from work, climb the stairs and there are the sacrifice offerings to the great toy gods, laying all around the front door.
Unfortunately, not all of the toys make it down the semi-roof over the door. There was one glob of play-doh that they threw out there, unreachable by broom, mop and whatever other pointy things we usually use to retreive them. Everytime it rains, this dried out peice of play-doh, slips a little further down the roof, leaving an even longer purple slime trail.
I don’t know if it’s weird, but my daughter likes the SDMB. One day I was reading a thread that cracked me up. She came running in and asked “What funny?” I told her Daddy was reading funny words. Now every time she sees that I’m on the board she points at the screen, yells “Funny words!”, and laughs hysterically for about a minute.
Hoo-boy, can I tell some stories.
My Darling Daughter is 13 now.
She was about two, and had a set of corrugated cardboard blocks/boxes that looked like building bricks. She was happily building this interesting little structure for awhile. I looked over, and she’s inserting her doll into the front opening of this structure. I asked her what she was doing (in that oh-so-interested Mommy voice). She replied:
“I’m baking the baby.”
“You’re BAKING the BABY? WHY?” I inquired.
“She a BAAAAAAAAAAD baby.”
With visions of CPS in my head, I say, “Don’t bake the baby. Mommy doesn’t bake YOU.”
She said, “I GOOD baby. This a BAD baby. I baking her now.”
Same child named all her stuffed animals, including middle names. Some of her more intriguing choices were “Patches Therapy Ourlastname”, “Fluffy Nightiegowd Ourlastname” and “Hubert Credenza The Harris Lion Ourlastname.” She also named a Chia Pet after my husband’s urologist.
She also liked to run naked through the house, all the while yelling “NAKED BABY!” Since she referred to herself as “Kiki” (a baby variation on her real name) we began calling her “Keeker The Streaker,” a name that she will still answer to.
I had to bump this, because the weirdness has rubbed off on to my stepson.
Johnzilla & Dianasaur are running around yet again with pull-up pants on their heads.
But this time, they’ve found their leader.
The Timinator has designated himself “Captain Underpants,” the hero of a popular kids’ book series. He is now running around with a blanket tied around his neck as a cape, his Spongebob underwear on over his jeans, and a pair of Tazmanian Devil boxers tied around his head.
I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while. 